Promoting Leadership Principles in Product Management

Tag Archives: teamwork

Today’s product managers wear many hats and are required to be motivators, counsellors, mentors, and enforcers. It’s difficult to balance competing job priorities and some leaders do a great job of truly engaging with their teams. And many others, despite their best efforts, manage to motivate the top performers but can’t seem to get the whole team rowing in the same direction. We found that to create a common goal, it’s vital to ramp up your purpose as an organization. Here, we will share from our book The Purpose Revolution: How Leaders Create Engagement and Competitive Advantage in an Age of Social Good how to develop and polish your team purpose statement.

We live in a world that makes it increasingly easy to justify failures and abdicate responsibility. Too often the news trumpets the reasons why certain groups don’t get what they want, and they showcase how those in authority are responsible for others’ shortcomings.

While there are certainly injustices in world today, successful individuals don’t let them affect how hard they work or what steps they take to progress. Capable leaders keep doing the right things for their teams and their customers. They persist through difficulties, and in the process, they create a culture of persistence.

Thanks to the Industrial Age we (still) live in a world where most companies hire employees. They look for people with the right education, who have been trained with the right skills to do their job. They create a human factory of sorts.

The ‘employee’ world is changing, albeit slowly. Smart owners are seeing increased productivity and profits by turning their employees into stakeholders. Stakeholders take initiative, they take ownership, they solve problems. Stakeholders don’t wait around passively for something to happen; they make it happen. Stakeholders do great things.

As a CEO, I make sure that at the end of the week I know what every member of my team is up to and they know that I know. Why? Because I believe that for most companies, especially start-ups, the greatest challenges can only be solved with a highly engaged and motivated team.

I think that it doesn’t come as a big surprise to anyone, but having a motivated and strong workforce is vital to every company. The problem is, that although, in theory, most leaders acknowledge the need for taking care of employees, only one third of the workforce in US is engaged at any given year. But engagement and worker happiness are not topics we can only talk about to make us look good. We must actually make them feel good. Continue reading →

The central competency of any corporate (or charity or political or sports) leader is the ability to build a great team. But how? What are the key elements? And while sometimes we have the luxury of putting together a team from scratch, where you can pick the individuals you want to have, more often leaders inherit a team that may or may not have a record of performance, that they need to build into a ‘best team’. Here are a few key things: Continue reading →